Published in 1996, Richard Jones’s Garbage Collection was a milestone in the area of automatic memory management. The field has grown considerably since then, sparking a need for an updated look at the latest state-of-the-art developments. The Garbage Collection Handbook: The Art of Automatic Memory Management brings together a wealth of knowledge gathered by automatic memory management researchers and developers over the past fifty years. The authors compare the most important approaches and state-of-the-art techniques in a single, accessible framework.

This course covers all aspects of garbage collection in Java, including how memory is split into generations and managed and how the different collectors do their job. We also cover the classes you can use to interact with the garbage collection, such as Soft, Weak, and PhantomReference.